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Fraud*According to the Collins English Dictionary 10th Edition fraud can be defined as: "deceit, trickery, sharp practice, or breach of confidence, perpetrated for profit or to gain some unfair or dishonest advantage".[1] In the broadest sense, a fraud is an intentional deception made for personal gain or to damage another individual; the related adjective is fraudulent. The specific legal definition varies by legal jurisdiction. Fraud is a crime, and also a civil law violation. Defrauding people or entities of money or valuables is a common purpose of fraud, but there have also been fraudulent "discoveries", e.g. in science, to gain prestige rather than immediate monetary gain*As defined in Wikipedia

Monday, October 10, 2011

Jargon, slogans, euphemisms, and terms of art are all weapons in the upgrade/downgrade tradition. We might class them together under the technical term bullshit, set out by philosopher Harry Frankfurt. The routine refusal to speak with regard to the truth is called bullshit because evasion of normativity--correctness being, after all, a standard external to one's personal desires--produces a kind of ordure, a dissemination of garbage, the scattering of shit. This is why, Frankfurt argues, bullshit is far more threatening, and politically evil, than lying. The bullshitter "does not reject the authority of truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."By Mark Kingwell - Harper's Magazine

I have been working as an undercover investigator of hijacked economic truths for many years. It doesn’t pay much, I work long hours, but I sleep well at night. It is the nagging questions that help me get up in the morning and do what I do. What is the economy for? Where has the middle class gone? Why have manufacturing jobs fled the US? Why is CEO-to-worker pay ratio 471:1 in the US, while it is only 20:1 in Canada? Why haven’t we wiped out unemployment once and for all? No, really. Permanently! Why do we have child hunger, mass poverty, and stunning income inequality in the richest country in the world? And everywhere I turn, I keep getting the same answers: “Because The Market said so! Because this is how The Market works. Because these are the laws of The Market.”

After years of hearing about The Market, I had one simple question:

Who. Is. The Market?

Has anyone seen him? Has anyone talked to him? Gotten answers? Maybe asked him to change his ways? I cannot think of a single journalist, economists, or policy maker who has interviewed The Market. And then I knew…this was only a job only for Dr. Gal Noir. I wanted to hear more about The Market’s rationale for what seemed to be very disturbing developments. I wouldn’t normally investigate questions that are only of interest to me, but it turns out that The 99% have been asking the same questions too. Of course, we all know who The 99% are. Here are their stories and their faces. But no one seems to know exactly who The Market is!

I kept hearing that if governments tried to regulate consumer products like home mortgages, credit cards, grocery food, children’s toys, etc… they will invariably injure The Market by interfering with his operations.

So I wondered.What does The Market do?

Is his work more sacred than mine or yours? Is his health more important than ours? Is his business so vital that he should never be disturbed?

Perhaps I could find answers to these questions if I understood what The Market was for. What he was trying to do. What purpose did he serve? How did he work to achieve his goals?. . . .

I was shocked, exasperated, disheartened. If I couldn’t find The Market here, where could I possibly go?! MSNBC? I don’t think so! I heard they hatedThe Market.

Dejected, I still carried on. One thing was becoming clear—either The Market was very important or very, very dangerous. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be in hiding. I just couldn’t believe it was the latter—after all, as we learn in kindergarten, The Market gives us freedom, opportunity, prosperity.

And then I remembered… We experience recessions every 7-10 years; financial crises (big or small) – just as often (if not more often). Today there are 29.3 million unemployed and underemployed people in the US, 17 million hungry children, 16.8 million full-time workers who live in poverty, millions of homeowners under water and in foreclosure, and millions more dealing with crushing student debt…

Whatever The Market was up to was not working. I had to find him. Right away. Confront him. Hold him accountable. Ask the questions The 99% wanted to ask! Millions of lives were at stake here. But where was he?

Maybe The Market had gone Rogue! Maybe we had left him alone for too long and he has gone mad! Maybe he needed friends. Maybe he wanted to be reintegrated into the social fabric, to find meaning and purpose, to be once again connected to reality, community and nature. Anyone would go nuts if they were isolated for too long.

And then it dawned on me -- maybe he knew he was in trouble and had checked himself into an Insane Asylum? Yes! That was it.

So I headed to Wall Street.

It took me that long to figure out what The 99% already instinctively knew?! But at least I was on the right track… I just had to squeeze past the barricades, avoid the police batons and pepper sprays, and ask my questions.

Once I knew what I had to do, it wasn’t very difficult. I put on a corporate suit, an ‘important’ look on my face, assumed a condescending attitude, and jumped into my 6 inch heels. I walked right past the police—they even pepper sprayed a couple of #OWS students to make way. Go figure! But I’m sure The Market told them to do it. I waltzed right in and was granted my exclusive interview on the condition that I did not disclose the actual location of The Market. (But you already know where it is now, don’t you?)

It turns out that The Market wasn’t a ‘him’ at all. It was them! Yes, them. The familiar faces! They all sat around a big table. One had a graying beard, another – giant glasses (and for some bizarre reason was holding a Conductor’s baton), a third was tall…really tall… but I could still see the drops of sweat on his bald head, a fourth had a silly, almost mousy look but his curly locks were charming. And then there were countless of others whom I couldn’t quite discern from the glare of their Rolex watches.And so I began:

Dr. Gal Noir: Are you The Market?

Them: Yes. In a manner of speaking.

Dr. Gal Noir: In a manner of speaking? What does that mean? Where is THE Market?

Them: Well, there really isn’t A Market… We are filling those shoes.

Dr. Gal Noir: What do you mean there isn’t AMarket? Everyone thinks there is A Market and that it is all-powerful and should not be disturbed under any circumstances because he makes all the decision about the economy.

Them: It’s true. We are quite powerful and do not like to be bothered. We like to be left alone. We are very busy setting the world record on CEO-to-worker pay ratio. We’ve managed 471:1! We’ll have you know that this is quite an achievement, considering that we are very busy with paper shredding and yachting.

Dr. Gal Noir: Wait! What? Let me get this straight. You don’t want to be disturbed, you wish to do whatever you like, and you want to be called THE Market? But what purpose do you serve? And where in the world did you get all this money?

Them: Well, all money in the economy is generated when people and governments spend, produce, buy, sell, employ, build... We just ‘manage’ it, play around with it, leverage it, whatever you want to call it. But for our services, we take a sizeable percentage -- be it from pension funds, school endowments, public employee benefits, children’s trusts… We get quite a bit from government in the form of subsidies too, and are hoping to get all of Social Security very soon as well. And we cannot be disturbed. We are planning for CEO-to-worker pay ratio of 1000:1 over the next 5 years. This is our 5 year plan!

Dr. Gal Noir: You have plan? What?! I thought there was no planning in a market system!

Them: Oh no, no, no, no. Ha ha ha. Where did you hear such a foolish thing? Of course, there is planning. There is always planning. The point is who gets to do it. We very much like to plan. We plan, for example, where to invest your money (mostly in our own proprietary trades), whose mortgages to refinance (usually our friends’), whose jobs to export (most), which workers will lose their benefits (we are still working on public sector workers), which employers will get a line of credit (multinational corporations of course. No mom-and-pop stores, please!), and we prefer employers with the highest rate of profit and the smallest wage bill. This is how we plan to hit our 1000:1 ratio. We boost CEO pay and we reduce worker pay at the same time. It’s foolproof. You know, you have to work both with the numerator and the denominator. We have sophisticated math models to demonstrate this.

Dr. Gal Noir: So if some new entrepreneur has an amazing new technology and wants to hire, say, 30,000 workers to flood the market with electric cars, you are the ones who decide whether or not that entrepreneur gets funding?

Them: Of course. We killed that crazy idea once in the 90s and we’ll do it again. It’s not a good plan.

Dr. Gal Noir: It’s not a good plan to flood the market with electric cars or to employ 30,000 people?

Them: Well, both. The electric car hurts the oil market (you know, THE market). But hiring 30,000 people is really foolish. We’ve got robots that could do pretty much anything we need, why would we need people?

Dr. Gal Noir: Doesn’t the economy exist to serve and provide for the people?

Them: Oh, hardly. The economy is ours. We plan it and it serves us. If the people were smart, they would have acquired the economy first. Survival of the fittest, baby. So now the people are on their own and should take personal responsibility for their lot. We do, on occasion, hand out some bootstraps.

Dr. Gal Noir: What about the government? Isn’t it supposed to serve the people?

Them: Well, we are pleased to announce that the government is ours too! We plan what it should and should not do. In fact, we are planning on permanently closing down Congress, the EPA, the FDA, the Education Department, and the Attorney General’s office (some people have been asking him to put us behind bars, so we’ve decided to eliminate his position). We’ll retain the Defense Department and the Supreme Court but will regulate them closely (after all the Supreme Court gave us the votes: $1=1 vote. Long live Citizens United!) But strong control and regulation of government is of utmost importance. We will regulate the courts, the prisons, the military industrial complex, and will instruct them who to sue, who to jail, and who to invade. People want regulations. We will give them regulations.

Dr. Gal Noir: You will close down Congress? Who will bail you out the next time you screw up?

Them: Not to worry. The Treasury and the Central Bank are ours too. Perhaps you did not recognize some of us in the room?

I had never seen this sign before so I was sure that I was still dreaming.

“Pinch me”, I asked the student. He did. I didn’t wake up.

Dr. Gal Noir: So this is not a dream?

MMT Student: No, it is not.

Dr. Gal Noir: I know now that this is a fictitious market. I know that there are no natural, immutable laws that make it do whatever it is doing. I know that it doesn’t work the way it is supposed to and that there is nothing sacred about the results it generates. I know that The Market can be anything we choose to make it. Someone plans our economy as we speak in their own narrow special interests and it is time for us, the American people, to take it back. It is time to make government serve the public purpose! It is time for public money to serve public interests. It is time for the economy to work for society and not the other way around. It is time for the economy to obey the environment and not vice versa. It’s time……

I was delirious. So many thoughts ran through my head.. . . .

*Dr. Gal Noir is an undercover investigator of hijacked economic truths and an occasional blogger at New Economic Perspectives

Pam Martens in Counterpunch (hat tip reader 1sk) describes a programwhich allows private firms to pay the city to put a cop on the streetto police for them. I am not making this up. Oh, and the white shirtedcops that seem to be more aggressive in going after protestors (mostnotably, the one that infamously maced a group of women?) Theassumption has been that they are supervisors. Martens suggests theyare in the employ of businesses:

If you’re a Wall Street behemoth, there are endless opportunitiesto privatize profits and socialize losses beyond collecting trillionsof dollars in bailouts from taxpayers. One of the ingenious methodsthat has remained below the public’s radar was started by the RudyGiuliani administration in New York City in 1998. It’s called the PaidDetail Unit and it allows the New York Stock Exchange and Wall Streetcorporations, including those repeatedly charged with crimes, to orderup a flank of New York’s finest with the ease of dialing the deli fora pastrami on rye.

The corporations pay an average of $37 an hour (no medical, nopension benefit, no overtime pay) for a member of the NYPD, with gun,handcuffs and the ability to arrest. The officer is indemnified by thetaxpayer, not the corporation.

New York City gets a 10 percent administrative fee on top of the$37 per hour paid to the police. The City’s 2011 budget called for$1,184,000 in Paid Detail fees, meaning private corporations werepaying wages of $11.8 million to police participating in the PaidDetail Unit. The program has more than doubled in revenue to the citysince 2002.

The taxpayer has paid for the training of the rent-a-cop, hisuniform and gun, and will pick up the legal tab for lawsuits stemmingfrom the police personnel following illegal instructions from itscorporate master. Lawsuits have already sprung up from the program.

Pam Martens in Counterpunch (hat tip reader 1sk) describes a program which allows private firms to pay the city to put a cop on the street to police for them. I am not making this up. Oh, and the white shirted cops that seem to be more aggressive in going after protestors (most notably, the one that infamously maced a group of women?) The assumption has been that they are supervisors. Martens suggests they are in the employ of businesses:

If you’re a Wall Street behemoth, there are endless opportunities to privatize profits and socialize losses beyond collecting trillions of dollars in bailouts from taxpayers. One of the ingenious methods that has remained below the public’s radar was started by the Rudy Giuliani administration in New York City in 1998. It’s called the Paid Detail Unit and it allows the New York Stock Exchange and Wall Street corporations, including those repeatedly charged with crimes, to order up a flank of New York’s finest with the ease of dialing the deli for a pastrami on rye.

The corporations pay an average of $37 an hour (no medical, no pension benefit, no overtime pay) for a member of the NYPD, with gun, handcuffs and the ability to arrest. The officer is indemnified by the taxpayer, not the corporation.

New York City gets a 10 percent administrative fee on top of the $37 per hour paid to the police. The City’s 2011 budget called for $1,184,000 in Paid Detail fees, meaning private corporations were paying wages of $11.8 million to police participating in the Paid Detail Unit. The program has more than doubled in revenue to the city since 2002.

The taxpayer has paid for the training of the rent-a-cop, his uniform and gun, and will pick up the legal tab for lawsuits stemming from the police personnel following illegal instructions from its corporate master. Lawsuits have already sprung up from the program.

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Famous Quotes

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the greatest liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. … H.L. Mencken

An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it…James Albert Michener, novelist (1907-1997)

It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. … Thomas Paine 1737-1809, Anglo-American Political Theorist, Writer

Laws just or unjust may govern mens actions. Tyrannies may restrain or regulate their words. The machinery of propaganda may pack their minds with falsehood and deny them truth for many generations of time. But the soul of man thus held in trance or frozen in a long night can be awakened by a spark coming from God knows where and in a moment the whole structure of lies and oppression is on trial for its life.: Sir Winston ChurchillWhen governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. - Thomas Jefferson

When cheaters prosper, we end up with the worst possible system and to call it a free market system is an obscenity. -William BlackWhen the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty." - Thomas JeffersonI believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property - until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. Thomas Jefferson - 1802

Don't be afraid to see what you see.

..................................... Ronald Reagan

When the people and the government fear Banksters like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, there is economic dictatorship that will destroy the very fabric of our existence as a civilized society.Mike Morgan

Let me control the money of a nation and I care not who makes its laws.Meyer Amsheil Rothschild

Together We Can Make A Difference!Larry Rubinoff*************Send your "Famous Quotes" to info@goldmansachs666.com